The Midnight Zoo (13 page)

Andrej stared into the shadows, scarcely breathing. Tomas, on the bench, had burrowed into his jacket. The wolf’s silver hackles were raised.

“The bride-to-be was delighted with her new pet. None of her friends owned such a prize, so they were all satisfyingly jealous. The cub was dressed in ribbons and bows, and when dining on the choicest cuts she wore a little bib. At night she slept on the bride-to-be’s bed, and when the dew was off the grass in the morning she was walked around the garden at the end of a velvet cord. She chased peacocks over manicured lawns, and marzipan mice across great halls. She was driven through cities in open-roofed cars so people on the streets could marvel at her. When the jealous friends or regal guests came to visit, she was brought out to entertain them. If she played like a kitten and made everyone smile, she was given a slice of butter. If she hid or hissed or struggled or bit, she was given a little smack. Her world was a rich one, finely dressed and perfumed. She could not have asked for more affection or better care. But a lion in a spoiled lady’s boudoir is still a lion, isn’t she?”

It was not a question, and Andrej said nothing. The llama shuddered, blinking wide eyes.

“Time passed. The cub was growing. She had never done anything a lion does — never feasted on zebra, never lapped from a lake, never roared to her sisters across a sunstruck plain — but the marrow of her bones knew what she was, and what she’d been born to do. Her claws knew, her teeth knew. Her pride knew.

“Soon came the day when the bride-to-be would become the bride. The hunter had returned from his bloody jaunts, the church was frothy with flowers, the priest and the guests were gathering. Naturally, the bride wanted her wedding to be the talk of the season. Months earlier she had visited the jeweler and ordered a diamond-encrusted collar and leash. Now, shut in a room to one side of the church while the guests shuffled into their pews, the girl in her ivory dress and veil asked that the cub be brought to her. The idea was that the bride should be accompanied down the aisle not just by her father but by the tamed beast as well, this symbol of beauty and freedom subdued, of splendor captured and contained.

“The animal that was brought to her was hardly a cub any longer, however. The cat was a yearling, bigger than any dog, with big clumsy paddles of paw concealing claws that could carve marble. What the cub thought of the white, towering, lace-veiled spectacle that was her mistress we don’t need to wonder, given what happened next. The wedding day did become the talk of the season, but not for the right reasons.

“In a life filled with bewildering, unnatural sights, this anemic specter was the one which changed a lion cub into a lioness. As the ghostly bride reached down to fasten the diamond collar, the petrified beast lashed out a paw, and opened the bride’s face from ear to ear.”

One of the animals breathed harshly, trampling the stone. An old maple leaf dislodged and made a papery sound as it tumbled from branch to branch. Wilma burbled, and the boar paused to listen. Then it went on.

“Can you picture the scene, boy? The rents torn through the veil. The porcelain cheeks slashed by arching wounds, elegant as a poet’s flourish. Ruby blood flowing in sheets from these wounds, swamping the heirloom pearls. Rivers of crimson pouring down the white bodice, flooding the layers of dress. The diamond collar dropping with a dainty
clink
to the floor. The scream that flew out the door like a kestrel, soaring up into the rafters. The confused rush and flutter of the guests. The face of the hunter when he saw his beloved, her loveliness erased. Can you picture it in your mind, boy? Because the hunter always would. He’d see the spitting cub and the flailing bride, both of them pressed in horror to the floor, two lives in which he’d meddled and now must stir himself to muddle further, because he could never marry a disfigured woman, and the beast must face the consequences of being born a vicious lion. Off he marched, wax-faced with affront, to fetch the one thing in the world that would never disappoint him: his gun.

“Oddly enough, it was the bride who saved her. Perhaps the girl had more respect for the creature than she’d shown in front of her friends. Perhaps she was genuinely fond of the animal, and understood the blow had been dealt not in malice, but fear. Perhaps she knew that she too, now forever marred, faced a future in which her happiness relied on the mercy of others. Who knows? Whatever her reason, she stayed the hunter’s hand. Maybe he would have ignored her, given that he loved shooting things more than he loved her. But the wedding guests and the priest were there, and his agonized ex-fiancée was arguing for the cat’s life, and under the circumstances it would not have looked gentlemanly to tell her to shut her mouth.

“And so the cub who was now a lioness was cast out from that lush life, and sent here, to this end-of-the-road place, and put in a cage which was hung with a sign that said
WARNING: LION BITES.
Because there
was
a lion in the cage, the first she’d ever seen; but her leonine teeth and bones recognized him, as his teeth and bones recognized her. In each other, they saw the dusty plains, the stumbling zebra, the swampy drinking pool. In the lion’s noble shadow she left behind the petted plaything she had been and became instead a true lioness, who heard in her ears the rattle of sandstorms, whose whiskers were blown by the churning monsoon. A true lioness who lived in a cage, doomed to pace the bars without cease, searching for something she knew, yet couldn’t see. But in time there came three young of her own, and the company of these and of the lion brought her some serenity. In the wriggling cubs was the proof that, despite the iron bars and the staring faces and the jeweled leashes and the marzipan mice, she was and always had been lion to her core. When she closed her eyes, she saw sweeping visions of magnificence. She saw all things that lions have seen since the first lion left its paw prints on the land. Her life would never be as she would wish it, but the great tribe of lion had not forgotten her.

“But then you started your war, boy, and nothing is as important as what humans want, is it? Nothing is as important as what humans do. You took the lion and the cubs from her as easily as you had taken her littermates and the zebra and the plains. She stood where she is standing now and watched them pushed onto a truck and driven away; she heard them calling until the road unrolled far enough to take even their voices from her. And now she’s a lioness locked in a zoo, and at night she looks at the stars and wonders if the tribe has, in fact, forsaken her, though all her life she’s been true. And now
you,
you wretched boy, refuse her the sight of your squealing piglet, as if a piglet is too treasure-some to go anywhere near the likes of lion — all the while waging your war with such enthusiasm for death, such carelessness for life, that it’s clear nothing on earth is precious in your eyes. What makes that baby an exception? Amid such carnage, what matters the fate of one more? You disgust me, boy.” The boar gave a slight, low snicker. “You claim to be different from the
gadje,
but you aren’t. Humans are all exactly the same. Each of you lives in a fever of selfishness and destruction. You persecute the creatures that you fear, yet the species you should fear most is your own. I hope this war buries every one of you. Oblivion is clearly what you want, and I hope your wish is fulfilled.”

The animals stood like exquisite sculptures in their cages, moonlight pouring from their muzzles, their shadows cast onto the ground as if something of their wild natures was seeping over the stone. Tomas sat in rigid silence, his sights riveted to Andrej, who stood staring across the grass into the blackness of the boar’s cage. A piercing like a poison thorn was dragging down Andrej’s spine. He didn’t know if the boar was free, if he must fight or would be spared, and he stood watching for the smallest movement, listening for the faintest sound . . . But then he saw that such guardedness was unnecessary. Even if the boar was loose, it wasn’t going to attack him. The boar
wanted
him to stand there, pinned beneath moonlight and the unflinching gaze of the animals, drenched by accusations, dredging for more courage than he owned. It had cornered him into making a choice he didn’t want to make, into proving something he feared to prove. It wouldn’t do anything that would allow him to shirk his decision, or earn him their audience’s pity.

But I’m only a boy,
Andrej wanted to protest.
What have I done? What can I do?

Wilma gurgled, and he glanced at her. She had extricated a hand from the shawl and was wagging it at him, and Andrej heard himself think distantly that the lioness was right: his mother
would
be proud of how he’d cared for his brother and sister. Looking at them, she would see how he’d tried.

He lifted his head, and his gaze circled the iron-bar wall of the zoo. The animals were watching him, tense and unmoving. Andrej stared back at them, feeling suddenly mulish, standing his ground. He would not be bullied by a pig into offering his sister to a hungry cat.

But there are many kinds of hungers. The eagle, the bear, the monkey, and the seal; the wolf, the chamois, the llama, and the kangaroo; the lioness and Andrej, and Tomas and Wilma, and doubtlessly even the boar: all these had an echoing place inside them from which something vital was now missing. Andrej remembered the boy he’d been such a short time ago — a boy who had trusted that the world was strict but fair. Since then he had seen this faith upended and made laughable. In this new world, a kite could betray the children who played in its skimming shadow. A soldier was not an honorable warrior, but one who chose his victims from among the innocents. A woman would steal a baby, a man would obliterate a town. This wasn’t a world that made sense to Andrej: it was a hard wintry shell of a world, bare of compassion.

Yet for all that, he still trusted. It amazed him to discover it: that underneath his grief and disenchantment, his belief in a good world was still there. And the more difficult it became to find the goodness, the more certain he was in his faith that it was there.

He turned away from the boar’s cage, sure now that even with his back to it, the creature would not come for him. The lioness was standing in the corner of her cage, the moonlight laying stripes across her body. She watched him step closer, one step, another. A lioness is something distinctly
other
than a boy, but, close now, Andrej saw what it was they shared: a determination to endure.

He shifted Wilma until she was sitting in his arms, the shawl peeled back from her face, her tiny hand tucked away. Then he lifted her up to the bars, so near that her forehead knocked the iron. The lioness was there instantly, all lashing tail and shivery muscle and cool, secretive eye. She pushed her face against the bars, her whiskers and jaw and heavy brow, her black lips and scarred snout and snowy chin. This near to her, Andrej smelled an ocher heat rising from her body, as if she’d spent a long day languishing beneath a searing sun.

Her nose was tawny and angular, as wide as a man’s palm. It nudged Wilma’s face and the bristling muzzle must have tickled, because the baby grimaced and snuffled. The lioness breathed in the infant’s scent and breathed it out again loudly, ruffling the baby’s sparse hair. Once more she breathed, and Andrej felt the warm air gale past him — air that had been inside a lion, had moved through her heart and mind.

Her muzzle wrinkled, and Andrej saw a glimpse of teeth and pale tongue. “They smell the same,” the lioness murmured. “My cubs smelled as she does. Like pollen.” She breathed deeply again, and Andrej saw the missing cubs returning to her on the wings of the baby’s perfume. “All young ones must come from the same place,” she said; then sat down on her haunches, seemingly satisfied.

Dawn was coming
. Night, who had been watching so closely, heard the feather-footed approach of Day in the east and drew his black steed nearer, ready to ride without effort away. The moon, which at midnight had shimmered so majestically, now seemed made of the dullest cloth. The sky that had been cobalt-blue was fading to the floury gray that would become clean morning. Dew gathered on the bars of the cages, and the kangaroo licked it up. The eagle on its perch shook its burden of wings. Smoky light slunk into the boar’s enclosure and found nothing to settle upon but a heaped pile of straw and the biscuits that Andrej had put into the cage. Tomas, sitting on the bench swinging his legs to keep warm, kept a wary eye on this pile of straw. For as long as he watched, not a strand of it shifted. The boar could be hiding under there, or it might have used the last of the dark to reach the pebbled path unseen and escape along the road from there. . . . Tomas wasn’t sure which he preferred.

Andrej’s bag had been repacked with the siblings’ valuables and vital goods. Wilma had been fed what was left of her milk, had had her stale swaddling changed, and been nursed by Tomas until she’d fallen asleep. She lay now in the nest of Tomas’s pack, ready to be carried anywhere. She would sleep until the middle of morning, and when she woke she would be dirty and thirsty, needing everything to be done again.